When a major San Francisco earthquake happened early in the 20th century, the level of damage was obviously beyond easy assessment at the time.
However, much of the San Francisco property was insured. The regional insurance companies in United States understood that San Francisco as an earthquake-prone region would have too high a cost in terms of the risk to be borne by the insurers.
These insurers thus reinsured with the largest insurance companies in the United States. The largest American insurance companies also were taken aback by the huge mismatch between claims likely to arise in the next few years and the premia they would receive.
So they all reinsured their money abroad, with Swiss Reinsurance Company.
Several hours after the earthquake had happened, multiple phone calls to offices in Zurich immediately began the process of deploying all possible aid to the United States. The Swiss Reinsurance Company brought in the best rescue equipment and machinery from Germany, France, Italy, Britain, Canada, Japan, and other places. The maximum possible funds that were needed were brought in to the rebuilding efforts. The company could afford it, because it wouldn’t require more than one-third of their cash balance.
All necessary measures and funds were deployed almost immediately, and while people learnt that, in the modern industrial age, the cost of a natural disaster is much greater, they also saw that the rich world could easily cope with all demands of such disasters and minimize the loss of life to levels not known in the poor world. Indeed, the People’s Republic of China denies extent of damage in earthquakes and refuses aid on any disaster that the government itself can manage, especially on poorly constructed public school buildings made out of materials from overfunded state-owned corporations.
So in this thread, let’s discuss how these corporate “supranational tyrants” (as Noam Chomsky would call them) have reduced us to slaves and have forcefully taken over and ruined our lives. 